We’re going to be recording a discussion for the SFFaudio Podcast this weekend. It’ll be centered around a wonderful, horrible, 19th century short story by Lucy Clifford. It’s called The New Mother.
Our narrator, Heather Ordover from the wonderful Craftlit podcast, has just sent me the file!
Happily it will be included in the podcast, along with our discussion of it, but I thought it might be interesting to share the audiobook with everyone early.
If you do download the audiobook |MP3| (which I’ll keep in my DropBox folder for the next week or so) and have a comment about the story, post it below. If it’s interesting we may refer to it in our discussion. And, for extra credit, we participants are planning on talking about The New Mother‘s relationship to Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and Philip K. Dick’s The Father Thing.
I’ve also put together a |PDF| from the original scans of The Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise (1882) over on Archive.org.
the Clarkesworld one was too quiet (by the way, we use Levelator), April Fools jokes fall out of date, The Cartographer Wasps And The Anarchist Bees by E. Lily Yu, Jenny’s favorite, it’s science and it’s fiction but is it science fiction?, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “nerdy mapmakers”, Ottoman Empire, Jenny is into language, ‘thrumming’, revolution, The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu, Tam was moved to tweet it, Jhumpa Lahiri and first generation Americans, do we need the fantastic part?, Mike Resnic-y, workshop stories, “he’s such a tool”, movie version?, Asian magic realism, the owl on Home Depot, Murakami, Jesse likes Leggos, childhood, Jesse please explain Mama, We Are Zhenya by Tom Crosshill, Tam sounds just like narrator Stefan Rudnicki, quantum mechanics, author’s blog post about the story, intellectual heft, it’s a five year old, Flowers For Algernon, head-eating clouds, Lost, YA novel about singularity, superpowers, and giant robots, author was a nuclear operator, Zhenya is everywhere, and now with a slightly older child — Movement by Nancy Fulda, we’ve read The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time |OUR READALONG|, “temporal autism”, we’ve also read Speed Of Dark |READ OUR REVIEW| so we are autism experts, or Asperger’s?, Daniel Tammet and prime numbers, “she doesn’t want new shoes”, father’s bug killer, (note: here I got E. Lily Yu mixed up with Yoon Ha Lee’s Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain from Sffaudio 120, here’s the full text and audio from Lightspeed), Her Husband’s Hands by Adam-Troy Castro, horror, SUPER CREEPY DO NOT WANT, the hyphen in the author’s name was originally a typo, Chiller Theater, war, The Hand with Michael Caine, Guy De Maupassant, House of Holes by Nicholson Baker, Bianca’s Hands by Theodore Sturgeon (podcasted by Spider Robinson), It by Sturgeon, some story about brains, eyes, and taste buds, Pruzy’s Pot (podcasted by Spider Robinson) has a monster under the toilet that does things, we make our Nebula picks and predictions, a moving story about ponies from last year, Kij Johnson, a story about sex with an alien, which story will be remembered in ten years? Toy Story III with immigrants, we will discuss Among Others by Jo Walton, sexy Welsh accent in the audiobook, Tam’s amazing Welsh accent, waiting for Jo’s series on Hugo-nominated novellas, get off my lawn with your books series’s!, how to find good stories/books, Christopher Priest’s amazing post, anything good after 1950?, Stories by Neil Gaiman and Alan Sarrantonio, The Truth Is A Cave In The Black Mountains |READ OUR POST|, Joe Landsdale on novels
Somebody, in reaction to my note that I was, in fact, listening to the Nebula nominated short stories, said to me:
“I assumed you didn’t read past 1950.”
It’s untrue! And unfair besides.
And while I freely admit a general preference for an older story, over a newer story, that preference is not one caused by nostalgia. Not at all.
All I prefer, really, is vetted stories, proven stories, stories with a gravitas unyielding. And it just so happens that stories that have endured a few decades of time’s alkaline indifference and come through, in toto, are better than some random tale, newly written, printed, or posted.
I make exceptions, especially when an author is a proven power.
And here’s one such. Neil Gaiman, one of my favourite writers, reading a short excerpt from The Truth Is A Cave In The Black Mountains, which is absolutely wonderful, and available in full HERE.
As a bonus, and more proof that I’m not chronologically prejudiced, see that dude right beside Gaiman? That’s one of my other favourite writers, a living writer, he’s right there, sitting on Gaiman’s left, it’s Lawrence Block!
The latest StarShipSofa podcast, episode #232, features Neil Gaiman‘s 2010 novelette The Truth Is A Cave In The Back Mountains as its “main fiction.” The narrator is Richie Smith and the story begins at about 12 minutes in.
There are few words that can get me as excited about a story as “Neil Gaiman” – he’s one of only a handful of living writers that’ll make me read anything he writes.
And when a story gets podcast I tend to go a little crazy, extracting the narration from any framing bits within the podcast, running that extracted audio through Levelator, and making my own art for the resulting MP3. Like this:
I took the original cover art by the wondrous Tom Gauld from the collection (Stories) where the novelette first appeared, photoshopped it (actually Paint.neted it), used MyFont.com’s “What The Font” feature to find the font (Didot LTStd-Roman), and put it all together.
Looking at it from the outside, it probably sounds completely bonkers to you. And perhaps it is.
But what can I do?
The medication that I’ve been taking for it (two carefully measured cups of coffee every morning) aren’t reducing the behavior in the slightest. Do you think I should up my dosage?
Update: Having now finished listening, I find The Truth Is A Cave In The Back Mountains to be yet more proof that Neil Gaiman is one of the best authors of any century. What Ted Chiang is to Science Fiction Neil Gaiman is to Fantasy.
How cool would it be to get a personal tour of Harlan Ellison’s secret comics room in his home in Sherman Oaks, California?
It’d be really cool right?
Yup, you’d be right! I know it is cool because I saw this video on YTV back in the early 1990s. It was produced as a segment for a fondly remembered TV show called The Anti-Gravity Room.
At the time Ellison was producing a comic called Harlan Ellison’s Dream Corridor. Sadly my collection was burglarized. I should have had them in a secret room like Harlan!
But now, come to think of it, his secret room now has, somewhere inside it, a CD copy of Scott’s SFFaudio interview with Ellison!
In which we ask relevant questions such as: “If you had to choose a universe without either Ray Bradbury or Neil Gaiman, which would you pick?” and “Which is the worst audiobook recording ever made?”
We’re going to be recording a discussion for the SFFaudio Podcast this weekend. It’ll be centered around a wonderful, horrible, 19th century short story by Lucy Clifford. It’s called The New Mother.
The latest StarShipSofa podcast, 
